1 April 2005

I’m a bit late for Easter eggs (well, not by much though), so I’ll bundle it with April’s Fools day: the first person to find the April fish (that’s the French tradition for April 1st) hidden somewhere on the site gets… well, he’ll know just when he finds it. (Yeah, better be a ‘he’.)

What amazes me with the flow of grieving masochistic oppressed masses who flock to Rome and every subsidiary in the world is the implication that yes, really, as incredible as the concept always appeared to me, there really were millions of peons crying when a king died. (And I’m not talking a Lady Di or a Rainier, but a real, all-powerful, God-sent, tax-imposing old-style king.)

Sennheiser RS 120: wireless headset, charges on its base, turns itself off while it charges, uses standard batteries that should be easily replaceable, the sound seems perfectly satisfying, the headset is a bit too tight on the ears, my computers and the microwave oven don’t cause interference, it’s all very well designed, which makes it all the more inexplicable that they’d put the radio frequency know right under the volume one.

P.S. Huh, dynamic compression is way overboard. I turn the computer’s volume up, and up and up, and nothing happens. It beeps, and the headset’s volume goes so far down I can’t hear the music for thirty seconds. Okay, it’s nice of them not to want to blow out my ears, but should the compression really be so strong, with no possibility of customization, or should I return it and buy something else?

P.S. Okay, I’m not dreaming, and it’s unbearable even for just listening to music.

5 April

How weird to see archive footage of him speaking, talking, for real, with words and sentences, distinctly comprehensible, in perfect (phonetical) French. How selfish of him, really, to have clung so long past his expiration date instead of letting the Vatican choose a more flattering — and modern — image to display. The worst flaws of monarchs — amplified by the fact that he doesn’t have the satisfaction of leaving the empire to his heirs.

The whole world hates the birde, they can’t get married religiously, the groom’s mother, who incidentally happens to be queen of the country, won’t attend the wedding, and now they have to postpone due to scheduling conflicts with no less than the Pope’s burial. What more signs do they need to cancel the wedding? How many twentieth-century media icons will have to die for them to live together? Their stubborness if gonna get an atomic bomb dropped over Europe if they keep up with it.

Good books, I keep for myself and recommend on my blog so you give their authors some money; bad books, I give away around me, setting them free, in hope they’ll find happiness in a loving home. Who will adopt the crappy books I couldn’t be bothered to read all the way to the last page?

(It’s only a rhetorical question — I’m not looking for foster homes, I already have my people.)

Oh my God, I’ve got worms. My computer lags, I run the task manager, sort by CPU use, and there it is: csrss.exe, a Windows system file whose name is also used by various worms. But how could I ever be contaminated? I don’t run Outlook, I don’t run Explorer (except for the major French gay chatroom, but, well, you gotta do what you gotta do), I don’t run the executable files my mother sends me… a worm? Me? Let’s see… csrss.exe, the Windows system file, has to do with display, but Photoshop is iconized, DScaler is paused, no graphics application is working, and anyway I didn’t start anything out of the ordinary yet I’ve never noticed this filename in my task manager, something’s very wrong. I open secuser.com, right click, “View This Page in IE”, and why are there so many uppercase initials in Firefox, I do realize I shouldn’t really trust a web antivirus my parents recommended but I haven’t got anything better, I start the online check, guess I’ll have to be patient now. But, still, how could I get a worm? Back to Google, looks like there’s half a dozen worms using this name so they’re automatically “protected” by the Windows task manager,but, come on, how could I ever get one? No, really, nothing could justify a display-related system file eating up 30% of my CPU time, and with all that processing power how many infected emails could I have sent before I noticed? Let’s close everything graphical just in case, but it won’t help. Oh, the Matrox PowerDesk driver’s zoom, that enlarges part of my display onto the third monitor, is activated, I’ll start with it. It shouldn’t take any CPU power, should just be managed by the video card, can’t be it. Ctrl-Shift-minus. Oh well, that was it.

Write down some of your favorite ingredients on small pieces of paper. Put them all in a jar, pick three at random (no cheating!) and see if you can come up with a recipe to make the most of your trio.

11 April

The summer sun is back. And, with it, the awakenings at ten thirty in the morning because I’m cooking in my bed, and every object overheating in my room, and the reflections making my computer screens all but unreadable until 4pm. Yeepee, right ?

12 April

The standard Mac OS Up-To-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchase a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller on or after April 12 for a shipping and handling fee of $9.95 (US).

I’m hesitating — switching it off every night (although they decided it’d be too expensive to add a power switch, and they forbid you to unplug the AC transformer from the mixing board while it’s powered) or leave it on? It doesn’t seem to heat too much.

Embedding Images: “Did you know you could embed any mime data in an HTML page? […] It means you can place an image inline in a page.”

For a while now I had thought it should exist, you should be able to embed images the same way you do in Flash, and it’d be ideal for pages with lots of small images (such as the thumbnails on my blog or the gayattitude directory), rather than have dozens of HTTP calls. Well, it does exist.

But then, of course: “It does only work in Firefox, Safari, Opera. Not IE.”

P.S. Oh, right, now I remember why I thought it’d be fantastic to be able to embed the image right into the HTML code: so I could put the thumbnails (for the blog or gayattitude) in the MySQL database! One simple SQL query and you got everything, text and images, no need for any additional system access.

I have half a mind to implement it for the blog’s thumbnails. After all, I don’t care too much that it wouldn’t work with Explorer: they’re only decorative.

Smart Mailboxes stay up-to-date automatically as you send and receive mail. Use the default Smart Mailboxes provided by Mail (Unread, Flagged, Today, Last 7 Days) or create your own using single or multiple rules. With Smart Mailboxes, your email can be in many places at once, even if you cant.

14 April

Highly reliable sources have confirmed the specifications of Apple’s forthcoming revisions to its Power Mac G5, iMac G5 and eMac systems, expected to start shipping within a few days of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger’s April 29th release.

15 April

Sarah Bettens lives happily her homosexuality… in… Tennessee. Sarah Bettens is a Belgian rock singer. Who appears to be a lesbian. And who has expatriated… to… Tennessee. I don’t know, maybe it’s me, but I have trouble imagining any reason why a lesbian would rather move into the Bible Belt than drag her girlfriend back to Europe, gagged and drugged if necessary.

Well… considering an iBook isn’t really reasonable because it’s expensive for what it is, and I like having a lot of pixel space, and if one day I have a real use for a laptop I’ll also be able to afford a larger one… and considering the next iMac revision won’t mow the lawn or have an attached robotic arm to hold my Coke cans… would a Mac mini 1.25 GHz with 512 MB of RAM work if I only want to have Mail, iChat, iCal and a browser running simultaneously?

Is there a trick I haven’t figured yet in order to make out the left headphone from the right, once you’ve put them in their black covers? Or don’t iPod users care which side the sound comes from? Or aren’t we supposed to use the covers, and they just put two pairs in the packaging for kicks, and we are to let the metal grids get messy?

Huh? My daily stats have almost doubled yesterday. Did everyone test my layout on different browsers? It can’t be all my feed subscribers coming to see how I changed the layout — it never happened before and I would have had more comments anyway. So what could it ever be?

16 April

Georgetown University scientists report that an ingredient in chocolate seems to have anti-cancer properties. Found in cocoa, pentameric procyandin turns off proteins that likely spur the out-of-control division of cancer cells. The research is funded by Mars Inc., makers of M&Ms and Snickers. Seriously.

But if I’m back to the Mac mini square (because there’s nothing more gratifying than being… uh… reasonable… uh, right, yeah, sure*), I’m also back to having to find a name for it. Bradshaw is only appropriate for a laptop (just watch a single episode of the show to understand why) and I still think Dalloway is too high-end for a mini. But how am I going to name it?

*: Can you tell that, as I was writing that, I began wanting to buy an iMac again, and screw being reasonable? Arrrrghhh, damnit, I’ll never manage to make up my mind! I’m gonna spend three days writing and signing and tearing out checks, until the exhaustion gets the better of me and I order a Dell.

There it is! The blog uses the technique I mentioned earlier this week to embed the blog and snaplog thumbnails directly into the HTML. Magically, it just works, and a little bit of Javascript takes care of loading images the old way if you’re using Explorer.

I couldn’t tell whether it loads faster, but like I said it makes more sense and it’s more efficient, in my head, to include all the little images into the HTML rather than have dozens additional HTTP requests. I’m sure the idea of forcing image data onto blind, deaf and mute readers would irritate the standards people to no end, but Firefox tells me the modified home page now weighs 66KB (which is surprising, but maybe it’s the gzipped size), so I don’t consider myself guilty of any crime against accessibility.

I’ll have to think about adapting my system to the comment avatars (and, while I’m there, loading favicons when there’s no gravatar), but there’s no hurry.

P.S. Yes, when I reload the page to proof-read something I just posted, it’s definitely faster. No waiting for the new thumbnail to load after my server has thoroughly confirmed that every other one hasn’t been updated since the last time (yes, I configured my Firefox to check the cache’s validity every time a page is displayed — haven’t you?).

I had forgotten how much trouble MSIE had dealing with mixing <table> and position: relative. Hence a slight modification of the layout. The comments counter will only be more readable this way. Rejoice.

18 April

Adobe Systems Incorporated has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.

Oh well. What a weird idea. Well, from Adobe’s point of view it’s not weird at all, but as far as users are concerned it’s mightily annoying. Adobe, the big mammoths that gives birth to big hairy mammothies of the powerful but expensive and bloated kind, absorbs the makers of Fireworks (I don’t care personally, but still), Dreamweaver (I don’t care personally any more, but still) and Flash (and now that’s serious). That’ll give them plenty of opportunities to make a big waste of the market and technologies. And to take a good, long Microsoft-like holiday until a brand-new competitor appears with another revolutionary technology, which isn’t going to happen soon.

Hasn’t it ever stricken you as odd how Chris Carter had disappeared from the surface of Hollywood for four years? Have you ever seen J.J. Abrams and Chris Carter together in your local Walmart? No, right? I knew it. Carter hides in a phone booth, puts his boxers over his thong (well, yeah, he wears both at the same time, so what, who are you to judge him?) and becomes Abrams and launches another mess of a show, and it takes the audience three years to realize it’s going nowhere.

Of course, I’m very far from being objective, because I already heard to many bad reviews of this season’s episodes — but I already found the season 3 reruns so painful that I can hardly imagine how this one could be better, even without the bad word-of-mouth.

I’d really love to know who, among the team of writers, is responsible for each aspect of the show’s evolution, because the aggregate is really weird. We know about well-written shows gone sour when their creator got tired or bored; we’ve seen lame shows become successes just because he actresses’ pregnancies triggered bouts of creativity; but I can’t find a rational, logical explaination for the way Alias goes. Except for a million monkeys with a million typewriters, of course.

20 April

Opera is offering a free license for Opera 8 automatically once 250 unique referrals from your site have been logged.

All you have to do is create a My Opera community account [and link] to Opera using the affiliate link.

So all it would take is a fifth of my daily readers clicking, just once, this shiny pretty link tomorrow, and I’d be rid of ads on Opera. Not that I care much about them (or almost at all, actually), but, hey: it’s possible, it costs absolutely nothing to anyone, and it flatters my ego (if it works out — otherwise I’ll be dead vexed), so why wouldn’t I do it?

I wonder about the profitability of the idea, though. If every blogger gets a free Opera registration, who’ll still be there to give them money?

Oh, and don’t just bump up my counter, download and install it, for real: even though the Swiss army knife aspect of it can be a deterrent, it’s only a 4MB download, and a good browser, but most importantly it’s a revolutionary and still unique email client (at least until Tiger ships), Spotlight before Spotlight: click a button or press ‘K’ to say you’ve read a message, and it disappears from your inbox (it’s so obvious when you explain it, you wonder how people can tolerate the way other clients work); click its sender in your contact list, or type a word it contained in the search box, and it reappears instantly. You’ll never have to manually file each read message according to its sender: a simple search will bring it back any time you want to read it again. It takes most people a few days to adjust, but once you’ve gotten used to it you can’t go back.

22 April

23 April

I thought that, as I started exercise again, it’d make me so hungry I’d eat as much as four people (I already eat as much as two, according to the packagings, but that might be because I buy my food in the small dogs aisle) and it’d cancel out my effort, but the opposite is happening: I’m less hungry than before. As if, instead of burning my fat, my abs were pushing toward the inside and taking my stomach’s space. But it’s the result that counts (well, of course, it’s not quite visible from the outside yet, because before I lose the fat I have to reconstruct some of the muscle), and the outlook is better now that I can do a 45-minute routine without articulatory pains.

On the other hand, I find myself almost unable to get back to reading. Which, now that I think of it, could very well be related: maybe all my brain cells fell down to the abs and thighs. (At least those that were left after the great puberty exodus.) And I’d been dreaming of a lobotomy for so long!

Or it’s just spring. Or depression. Or boredom. Or anxiety. Hey, yeah, I’ve got plenty of reasons to be anxious these days — and waiting for the new Macs to be announced is the most benign of all.

[…] The traiterous dog Krelcon was captured early this morning and brought around to the Imperial palace after breakfast. I had poached eggs with ham, buttered crumpets and a glass of wetfruit juice.

When the droid left I opened the small compartment on my chest where I keep my token of her. Every time I take it out to hold it I vow it will be the last time, and that I will crush it in my fist when I have found my peace. But that peace comes only nine tenths of the way and I find myself closing the compartment, the token once again esconsed inside.

It is so stupid.

It is just a japor snippet that was carved a long time ago. Part of a necklace that was dashed from her neck, before the choke.

Getting some “me time.” Mood: melancholy.

We have arrived at Coruscant, and I have retired to the Imperial Palace. I stand at my balcony and meditate on the sky, mad whorls of cloud pierced by endless lines of speeders. The constance of their hum is insectile, and reminds me of the sand crickets back home.

A propos of nothing, advice for neophyte bloggers: Never mention your biological troubles, no matter how benign, in your blog. You don’t want to find out through a comment, lost among the usual dozens of inside jokes and insults, that your last three posts, put together, indicate you’re going to die of cancer within three weeks.

(I watch Scrubs too much. Actually, two episodes per day, five days a week, is indeed way too much to really enjoy it. Damn those French networks.)

Funny how nothing seems to motivate me more to post than reminding myself how the majority of my readers are assholes. (More about that later — I’m still giving you the weekend, as benefit of the doubt.)

Not that I want to improve my blog’s quality in order to attract a better crowd, just that I don’t give a damn how good what I post is, since you deserve the worst. (With exceptions, of course, as implied by the use of the word “majority”, as opposed to a distinct minority.) And, as a consequence, the quality improves, just because I don’t care.

Tiger now takes screenshots in the PNG format. It’s far lighter than the PDF of Mac OS X 10.3.

And it’s none too soon.

Various effects won’t be available for everyone. For instance, when you add Widgets on Dashboard, there is a superb “droplet” effect if you card supports CoreImage (64MB VRAM minimum).

Copying this here so I can try to remember it when I choose which Mac I buy. Not just for Dashboard’s droplets, but for every effect you’ll lose in the future if you haven’t got the best video card in the world.

I couldn’t say it better. And I did say it poorly, in the new layout’s “welcome” block (did you quite figure out that I won’t make any efforts on your account anymore, or should I pee to your face so you do get the message?).

When Canal Jimmy introduced it six months ago, I felt like they had gotten an old 1980s show for cheap (I was just surprised Charlie Sheen could have been that fat at the time). The old sitcom sets, the old situations, the whole old-style thing. (And then, in the promos, the cast was marveling at how modern the whole thing was. Geez.)

Well, it wasn’t just an impression: today, in the last episode of the season, which was shot in 2004, the main character seriously considers having a vasectomy so he won’t risk unwanted paternities the next time he forgets to put on a condom. And I wouldn’t say I was really being attentive, but I didn’t hear a single mention of STD risks. None.

In 2004, a team of screenwriters wrote a story “reminding” straight men that the only risk they take is knocking a girl up, and the producers let that slide, and the actors just did it without hesitation.

Minor update of the homepage so the last column could move up a bit, because I couldn’t help but add a new gadget — a mix of moodlog and minilog (also available as RSS). I guess after I removed the guestlog my site’s structure had gotten too normal for my taste.

(Actually, it’s inspired by the sidebar item in which a blogger counted his daily push-ups — but it looks like he quit sport since I stopped reading him.)

27 April

The most retarded sentence in it is: “Curious, inventive people are making cool stuff again.” Um, hello? WTF? “Again”? I really don’t know how to respond to that other than to feel really insulted and feel like anything people made three or four years ago was somehow “boring” because there wasn’t any money attached to it. […]

I hate the equation that $1 million in funding == EXCITING OPPORTUNITIES. It’s how you fools lathered yourselves into the last bubble.

This is exactly what I thought the minute I read the essay: the fools are gonna play the whole bubble burst routine all over again. I hadn’t posted about it because I thought it was so obvious… and then I couldn’t believe how many blogs were ecstatic about this whole new vision of the web. Maybe because each of these bloggers is secretly hoping to be the one cashing in on the million of dollars that’ll fall from the sky this time around?

But I won’t only be criticizing tonight: sure, it’s frightening to see this article praised everywhere, but it made me discover Consumating, a very interesting personals site, very… very 2005, actually, that inspired me to get back to work on gayattitude. That’s the site I secretly hope we’ll manage to trade for big bucks when the second dot-com craze is at its peak — but, unlike others, that doesn’t cloud my judgment.

Nokia N91[via]: a 2-megapixel camera and… 4GB to store mp3s, photos and videos. Oh, and wifi, while we’re at it. I don’t know how good an idea it is to put a hard drive into a phone — I already have a hard time trusting an iPod, and a phone has a tougher life — and the design is in line with the latest Nokias (though more bearable here), including the interface’s, but… still… drool².

By the way, the N90 isn’t bad either. Far from it. Not original — Japanese phones have had this form factor for two years — but quite sexy. Would Nokia finally be coming back to the top?

If it goes on like this, I’m going to order a Mac mini on the very day Tiger is released, so I’m done with the waiting and can be sure I’m not buying an obsolete iMac. And I’ll say thanks to Steve for helping me solve my existential dilemma.

28 April

When [Adobe] was run by graphics/technology enthusiasts, it was a great graphics/technology company. Now that its run by a sales guy, it has turned into a company that seems more interested in the sales and marketing of its products than in the products themselves.

Adobe certainly isnt the only company to play marketing games with their application version numbers. […] But Adobes strikes me as the most egregious, especially since the core audience for the CS suite is comprised of the sort of creative professionals who are predisposed not just to ignore marketing bullshit, but to be downright insulted by it. […]

The entire CS campaign has the feel of a company that is marketing down to its customers, rather than treating them respectfully as peers.

If that spirit continues to wither, Adobe will continue its slide into mediocrity, and will become just another software company. But if it becomes a bigger company while doing so, I suspect that will suit [Adobe CEO] Bruce Chizen just fine.

29 April

.Mac, Apple’s suite of innovative software and Internet services, has just been enhanced. .Mac membership unlocks exclusive Tiger features including Mac-to-Mac syncing of keychains and Mail settings like accounts, rules, signatures and Spotlight-driven Smart Mailboxes.

So, if I get this right, to obtain the privilege of syncing two Macs, with a program that’s included in OS X, you have to pay the .Mac subscription, that’s roughly the price of the OS itself, even though said synching doesn’t (presumably) use the mac.com resources in any way?

This is exactly the kind of announcement that makes me have second thoughts about switching.

(Yeah, I know, rsync and all. Irrelevant. Or, actually, not: you have to pay extra in order to use a program that’s included with OS X, and does the same thing, only graphically, as another program that’s also included in the OS. That’s even better.)

30 April

Reading an article about Tiger, I realize that when I modify the Gayattitude website I’m like Steve Jobs deciding for each OS X updates of modifications he’ll impose on millions of users, like it or leave it (except I’m Steve and his engineers at the same time — and as a reasult it’s a much, much slower process). Maybe I should name the next version Gayattitude X. What, delusion of grandeur?

I intended to go to sleep early, and in the middle of the night stumbled onto the Ars Technica review of OS X Tiger: twenty long pages of thoughts and criticisms written by the geekiest Mac user you can find — an absolute must-read.

I had begun taking quotes out, but there were too many, so you’ll just have to read it for yourselves*. In short: makes me want it. And it also makes me want to buy a Mac with a top of the line video card: if I buy a Mac mini, I guess I’ll end up being more frustrated at the graphics performance than the CPU’s.

* a digest: the Aqua updates are as inconsistent as with every other update; the filesystem gets BeOS-style custom metadata, but doesn’t do much with it yet; Apple’s software, including Spotlight, doesn’t know about parentheses when it comes to boolean logic (even though the Spotlight command-line tool can process them perfectly); the Address Book and iCal store each entry, each event, in a separate file so Spotlight can index it, which is an odd way to manage the issue; Apple finally found an innovative solution to the file extensions / MIME types / creator codes conundrum; Quartz is even more optimized for modern video cards, but the optimization is turned off in version 10.4.0; Core Image and Core Video and Quicktime 7 are the bomb, except for the full screen display that’s only available with Quicktime Pro, cue rant (a copy and paste of what I wrote yesterday about .Mac); and lots of other things — like I said, you’ve got to read it. (If you’re a geek.)